The Beats

September 12, 2008

Every so often, we get teasers on the movie adaptation of On the Road. Nothing much new in this recent article, other than a hint that we're getting a little closer (for better or worse):

For the past three years, the Brazilian-born Walter Salles, whose new film, Linha de Passe, is released this month, has been working on a version that he hopes to "be shooting either at the end of this year or the beginning of the next". But will it happen? The story of two drifters, Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty – thinly veiled portrayals of the author and his friend, Beat icon Neal Cassady – Kerouac's episodic account of his seven-year span of road trips across America has defied attempts to bring it to the big screen. "It doesn't have a plot," says poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti. "It was a road novel – a picaresque, like Don Quixote."

The first screenwriter to tackle Kerouac's work was Michael Herr, who penned the hypnotic voiceover for Coppola's Apocalypse Now before co-writing Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket. Then came Barry Gifford, who not only had experience of the road movie after adapting his Wild at Heart for David Lynch to film but also wrote Jack's Book: An Oral Biography of Jack Kerouac with Lawrence Lee. After these versions were rejected, Coppola himself took a crack, writing a script with his son Roman (who co-wrote the script for another spiritual journey, The Darjeeling Limited).

"I tried to write a script, but I never knew how to do it," Coppola told me last year. "It's hard – it's a period piece. It's very important that it be period. Anything involving period costs a lot of money."

It probably didn't help when it came to convincing financiers that Coppola planned to shoot on black-and-white 16mm film. He held auditions in 1995, with poet Allen Ginsberg (the inspiration for the book's Carlo Marx) in attendance, but the project again collapsed. Then it materialised a few years later, with Coppola again at the helm, and Ethan Hawke and Brad Pitt mooted to play Paradise and Moriarty.

After this version also faltered, Coppola brought in the novelist Russell Banks. It was now 2001 – the year the 120ft scroll of tracing paper on which Kerouac wrote the book was sold at auction for $2.4m – and Joel Schumacher was in line to direct Banks's script. Billy Crudup replaced Hawke, and it was said Schumacher wanted Colin Farrell to play Moriarty. Yet again the project failed. Citing Vietnam and the murder of Martin Luther King as watersheds, Banks says, "You could never have the innocence that On the Road portrays, where two white guys could roll a pack of Luckys in the sleeves of their T-shirts, get in an old Hudson, drive to Denver and think they'd gone to another planet. You could never again have visions of liberation, freedom and control like that."

"Howl" marks the feature directing debut of documentarians Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, who were approached by the Allen Ginsberg Trust to make a film commemorating the 50th anniversary of "Howl."

As chance would have it, the lovers from Cleveland made their way to New Orleans by bus in 1940. He wanted escape from a marriage to an unfaithful alcoholic. She wanted to see the world. Until Jon Webb's death in 1971, their life was an odyssey as itinerant artists and underground publishers through the heart of American Bohemia — the Quarter, Greenwich Village, Hollywood.

The Outsider journal and Loujon Press, their crowning achievements, were publications unlike anything else in their day. Printed in the 1960s on hand-cranked presses with fine-quality paper, they were elaborate affairs. Although there were only four magazines and four books, they cultivated a roster of greats: Kenneth Patchen, Henry Miller, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs.

And what is most important, they gave the world Charles Bukowski, the king of boozy and sexually charged underground poetry, with the publication in 1963 of Bukowski's first full-length book, "It Catches My Heart in Its Hands."

Now destitute and with no home of her own, Gypsy Lou lives in her sister's dog-eared home in Slidell, where she's existed in a sort of exile for the past two decades. On this day, she sits on the sofa, clutching a watercolor of her husband, one of the few physical memories she has left of him.

July 28, 2008

In the New York Times, Adam Van Doren, grandson of poet Mark Van Doren, writes about discovering a ledger that belonged to his grandfather which contained the names of the students that Van Doren taught during his time at Columbia:

What I had in my hands was a singular piece of history, a collection of men (Columbia didn’t admit women at that time) who had helped shape the American literary canon for a better part of the 20th century. They had all studied under Mark Van Doren, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, literary editor of The Nation and legendary professor (though he would never have approved of that adjective).

[...]

Mark Van Doren believed that young people were intuitively capable of grasping even the most complex literature. After all, as he wrote in his autobiography, any student, by the time he has turned 18, has already experienced the deepest emotions of any Shakespeare play: he has fallen in love and been heartbroken, felt jealous, murderous and vengeful. Dostoyevsky and Sophocles have nothing over him in this respect.

The professor kept corresponding with these college youths years later, suggesting career paths, critiquing their manuscripts, promoting their work — even writing poems about them. “Death of a Monk (T. M.)” was written shortly after Merton’s death. He contacted publishers about promising students, encouraging Kerouac to publish “The Town and the City.” Kerouac quit the football team after getting an A in “Shakespeare.” (It should be noted that though the ledgers show my grandfather was a tough grader, those who would go on to make a literary impression on the world also did so in his classroom.)

June 11, 2008

But isn't it interesting that only the title of the book appears?
Where's Kerouac's name? Could it be that the words appeal but the
person who penned the words might turn off the Beemer drivers they are
trying to attract? Who knows. Maybe I'm just being sensative. Judge
for yourself.

June 04, 2008

There shall be mostly silence around these parts the rest of the week. Blame end of fiscal year. Blame Excel's vlookup. Blame the too early in the summer 95 degree days. Blame the neck pain. Blame a Clinton.

Hopefully it won't be as bad as all that but just in case...

Here's a Tom Waits interview from 1976. In it he discusses some of his influences, including the Beats, and tries, in that uncertain way that only Tom Waits can "try", to explain why he doesn't necessarily consider himself a Beat.

The next step (after the rejection of the original “Road”) was to redo the subject, chronological account of the hero’s life, in regular gothic-Melvillian prose.

That was started with one magic chapter about a Denver football field. But then K said, shove publishing and literary preconceptions, I want something I can read, some interesting prose, for my old age. “Visions of Neal” and “Dr. Sax” (1951-53) and another dozen subsequent books (prose, poetry, biography, meditation, translation, sketching, novels, nouvelles, fragments of brown wrapping paper, golden parchments scribbled at midnight, strange notebooks in Mexico and Desolation Peak and Ozone Park) follow.

Writing is like piano playing, the more you do it the more you know how to play a piano. And improvise, like Bach.

Not a mechanical process: the mechanical and artless practice would have been to go on writing regular novels with regular types form and dull prose. Well, I don’t know why I’m arguing.Too many critics (all incomplete because they themselves do not know how to write). Pound said not to take advice from someone who had not himself produced a masterpiece.

Am I writing for The Village Voice or the Hearing of God? In a monster mechanical mass-medium age full of horrible people with wires in their heads; the explanation is hard to make, after everybody’s cash-conscious egotistical book-reviewing, trend-spotting brother has bespoke his own opinion.It’s all gibberish, everything that has been said. There’s not many competent explainers. I’m not speaking of the Beat Generation, which after all is quite an Angelic Idea. As to what non-writers, journalists, etc., have made of it, as usual—well, it’s their bad poetry not Kerouac’s.

May 06, 2008

A new biopic, Neal Cassady, premiered last week on IFC. Unfortunately I forgot to set the DVR and now can only hope that they run it again in the near future. Or I guess I can wait for the DVD. Here's the trailer:

And here's more on the film from IFC:

IFC Festival Direct presents a film that poses the question: What happens to someone's life when they become famous through a fictionalized account? Noah Buschel's intelligent and unusual new biopic focuses on the life of Neal Cassady, one of the central figures of the Beat Generation. Chronicled by greats like Allen Ginsberg and Hunter S. Thompson, Cassady became an antihero for a new age. But, it was as Dean Moriarity, the lead character in Jack Keroucac's historic On the Road, that he was immortalized. Later in life Cassady hopes to settle into an ordinary family life, but the pressure from Beat fans to act like Moriarty haunts him. Shot gorgeously with a searing dreamy tone that mirrors the writing of the generation, "Neal Cassady" is the story of a man trying to live down his own legend. Before it kills him.

April 24, 2008

University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point professor William Lawlor reminds us that this year marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of SoT-favorite Lawrence Ferlinghetti'sA Coney Island of the Mind:

Ferlinghetti remarks, "People come up to me after poetry readings and say, 'You know, I read your book when I was in high school, and I split,' or 'I left home,' or 'It changed my life.' "

Billy Collins, former poet laureate of the United States, admits his debt to Ferlinghetti's "little amusement park of a book." Collins carried "A Coney Island of the Mind" in his pocket "up and down the treacherous halls of high school."

On the 50th anniversary of the publication of "A Coney Island of the Mind," New Directions is releasing a special commemorative edition, complete with a CD of Ferlinghetti reading from the text, with some recordings dating back to 1957, when Ferlinghetti read at the Cellar in San Francisco with the backing of the Cellar Jazz Quintet. The cover of the commemorative edition is new, but the text, which includes poems from Ferlinghetti's first book, "Pictures of the Gone World" (1955), is almost identical to the original. For readers who have $100 to spend, New Directions offers a limited slip-cased edition of 200 autographed copies.

Actually, if you don't mind doing your shopping at Amazon, you can preorder the signed copy of the 50th anniversary edition of A Coney Island of the Mind there.

April 23, 2008

I moved to this area a few years too late to attend the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill's conferences on the Beats and its hosting of Kerouac's On the Road scroll, but starting today, I will be able to catch UNC's new exhibit "The Beats and Beyond":

The Beats and Beyond will showcase approximately 100
publications, drawings, photos, and handwritten items associated with
writers from groups such as the Black Mountain poets, the Beats, the
San Francisco Renaissance, and two generations of the New York School
of Poets. The exhibit will also examine the literary counterculture's
engagement with issues such as censorship, feminism, Black nationalism,
and the Vietnam War.

April 21, 2008

As for the Beat Generation. Let’s all stop. Right now. This has turned into a Madison Avenue gimmick. When the fall book lists come out, it will be as dead as Davy Crockett caps. It is a pity that as fine an artist as Jack Kerouac got hooked by this label. Of course it happened because of Jack’s naivete—the innocence of his heart which is his special virtue. I am sure he is as sick of it as I am. I for one never beatified nor pummelled. I’m getting on, but I’ve managed to dodge the gimmick generations as they went past; I was never Lost nor Proletarian nor Reactionary. This stuff is strictly for the customers.

As for Jack himself. Yes, I threw him out. He was frightening the children. He doesn’t frighten me, though when he gets excessively beatified he bores me slightly. I think he is one of the finest prose writers now writing prose. He is a naïve writer, like Restif de la Bretonne or Henry Miller, who accurately reflects a world without understanding it very well in the rational sense. For that, Clellan Holmes is far better on the same scene, shrewd and objective; but, as I am pretty sure he himself would be the first to admit, not the artist Jack is, and lacking, because of his very objectivity, Jack’s poignancy and terror. One thing about Jack and Allen Ginsberg, who, I might remind you, are Villagers, and only were temporarily on loan to San Francisco: I had to come back to New York to realize how good they are. They have sure as hell made just the right enemies.

April 10, 2008

From "Clip Jobs", a running series on the Village Voice's blog in which every day they run an excerpt from their archives, here's Jimmy Breslin in 1958 reporting on a Jack Kerouac "meet the author" event in Brooklyn {see update after the quote}:

Every campus Bohemian, Hobohemian, and Subterranean had donned crew-neck sweater, taken pen and notebook in hand, and marched right down to that lecture to find out just what this crazy Kerouac and his beat generation are all about, anyway.

Jack, however, who had left Columbia “because I quite the football team and had to start paying tuition,” declined to make any pronouncements for the academy.

“What’s the beat generation’s outlook on life?”

“It’s an illusion.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s an illusion, not real—man, you ought to know, you go to college!”

The simmering hostility of the crowd boiled up as Kerouac identified his literary influences as Dostoevski and Walt Kelly. He calmly informed the Brooklynites that he wrote because he was bored, and published to make money.

Jack further declared that he was a story-teller and preacher, like Dostoevski, and that his writing, like a Chinaman, “spits forth intelligence.”

When a student inquired whether Kerouac was at present sober, Danny Price, one of Jack’s bushed entourage, broke in:

“There’s probably not one person in this room who doesn’t think he can write a book. But remember, this guy you’re putting down has written one.”

“Why don’t you answer our questions?” someone complained.

“I’m a Zen Master,” replied Kerouac.

Update:Apparently, this isn't that Jimmy Breslin. That Jimmy Breslin had even less respect for Kerouac: "It is not me. I knew Kerouac he lived in Richmond Hill, on 134th, near 101st.... The Philadelphia Inquirer,
gave him the whole roll of UPI [teletype] paper so he could just keep
typing. I should've given him a fucking box of periods. Taught a whole
generation how to write run-on sentences. A disgrace!"

March 02, 2008

A novel co-written by Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs, two giants of the "Beat Generation" of poets, writers and drug-takers, is to be published for the first time more than 60 years after it was written.

And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, written in 1945, was inspired by an actual killing which led to the arrest of both authors.

The novel draws upon the stabbing in 1944 of a homosexual, David Kammerer, by Lucien Carr, a friend of the duo and another Beat leading light.advertisement

Carr served two years after admitting manslaughter, claiming Kammerer had been obsessed with him and had become violent.

Carr confessed to Kerouac and Burroughs, who helped him dispose of the knife but did not go to police. Kerouac was arrested as an accessary to the killing in 1944 and was put in a Bronx jail but he was freed after his girlfriend, Edie Parker, stood bail.

Burroughs was arrested but escaped incarceration after his father put up bail.

February 11, 2008

If you happen to be in Austin between now and August 3rd, you might want to check out this exhibit at UT's The Harry Ransom Center:

Featuring more than 250 items drawn from across the Ransom Center's collections, the exhibition will take visitors on a journey through the cities, landscapes and communities that fostered and shaped the most important works of the Beat Generation, from the early 1940s to the mid-1960s. The exhibition runs from Feb. 5 to Aug. 3 in the Ransom Center Galleries at The University of Texas at Austin.

Jack Kerouac's scroll manuscript of "On the Road," on loan from the collection of Jim Irsay, will be on display from March 7 through June 1. The first 48 feet of this 120-foot "page" will be visible in the gallery. This visually stunning first draft has no paragraph or chapter breaks, and the characters are referred to by their real names.

[...]

The exhibition is drawn from the Center's extensive Beat holdings, which include letters from Ginsberg to Kerouac, "cut-up" manuscripts by Burroughs, the draft of Cassady's memoir of his childhood riding the rails with his father in Colorado, the papers of Corso and a 1948-1949 notebook in which Kerouac recorded notes for his novel-in-progress, "On the Road."

Other highlights include first editions of Beat publications, issues of Wallace Berman's experimental magazine "Semina," Larry Rivers's study for a portrait of Kerouac and prints by the poet and artist Kenneth Patchen.

February 04, 2008

I don't like living in the past either, but I'll make an exception for Neal Cassady, because he has always been one of my very favorite Beat Generation figures. Some of the very first articles published on Literary Kicks were about the connected careers of Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, the Grateful Dead and Ken Kesey, and probably the very first exciting and impressive thing that happened to me after launching LitKicks was that I was put into contact with Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow, who had circulated a short article about the origin of the Grateful Dead song "Cassidy" online. I asked if I could give the piece a home on LitKicks, he happily agreed, and you can still read his excellent piece about "Cassidy" and Cassady here.

Be sure to stop by and read Levi's interview with Carolyn Cassady. Great stuff.

February 03, 2008

One Fast Move or I’m Gone: Kerouac’s Big Sur takes the viewer back to Ferlinghetti’s cabin and to the Beat haunts of San Francisco and New York City for an unflinching, cinematic look at the compelling events the book is based on. The story unfolds in several synchronous ways: through the narrative arc of Kerouac’s prose, told in voice-over by actor and Kerouac interpreter, John Ventimiglia (of HBO’s The Sopranos); through first-hand accounts and recollections of Kerouac’s contemporaries, whom many of the characters in the book are based on such as Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Carolyn Cassady, Joyce Johnson and Michael McClure; by the interpretations and reflections of writers, poets, actors and musicians who have been deeply influenced by Kerouac’s unique gifts like Tom Waits, Sam Shepard, Robert Hunter, Patti Smith, Aram Saroyan, Donal Logue and S.E. Hinton; and by stunning, High Definition visual imagery set to original music composed and performed by recording artist, Jay Farrar of Son Volt, with additional performance by Benjamin Gibbard of Death Cab for Cutie.

November 07, 2007

I couldn't tell you the last time I actually made it out to see a movie. That will change next week with the release of No Country for Old Men. And I'll definitely find a few extra hours to take in this one if it makes it to my stretch of the woods:

"Obscene," the chronicle of a publisher's fight to print the works of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Malcolm X, Che Guevara and others, has been picked up for worldwide distribution by Arthouse Films.

Neil Ortenberg and Daniel O'Connor's docu looks at Barney Rosset, the publisher of Grove Press and Evergreen Review who waged repeated U.S. court battles over freedom of the press. Interviews and footage with Amiri Baraka, Jim Carroll, Al Goldstein (no relation to the author), Erica Jong, Ray Manzarek, John Sayles, Gore Vidal, John Waters, Lenny Bruce and William S. Burroughs are featured.

"Obscene," produced by the directors' New York-based Double O Film Prods., examines Rossett's public fights and personal demons. The soundtrack includes music by Bob Dylan, the Doors, Patti Smith, Warren Zevon, X and Ella Fitzgerald. Arthouse plans a 2008 theatrical and DVD release.

October 30, 2007

In 1924, in one of the first Crime(s) of the Century, [University of Chicago] students Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb misread Nietzsche and murdered (chloroform, chisel) a random boy to prove that they were supermen. It was quite a big deal because a) it was 1924, and b) they were rich, smart, Jewish, and gay.

In addition to two good films (Rope, Swoon), the murder/trial spawned the film Compulsion, which suggests that all this unpleasantness could have been avoided if they had only talked to girls once in a while. There have been no films, however, about the Columbia murder, which is, quite frankly, bullshit, because whatever the 1944 killing of David Kammerer by Lucien Carr lacks in malevolence, it more than makes up for in sordidness and famous people.

Carr was 19, rich, straight, and, by all accounts, a hot piece of ass—oh-so-hetero Jack Kerouac describes him as both a “fantastic male beauty” and “a mischievous little prick.” He had already bounced out of Andover, Bowdoin, and, obviously, the University of Chicago, where he tried to kill himself (head in the oven). Apparently none of these were deal breakers for the Columbia College admissions office, so he came to New York, with Kammerer one step behind.

Kammerer was 33 and had been—enjoy this moment, because your mind is about to be made up forever—the leader of Carr’s Boy Scout troop in St. Louis, and he had “followed” Carr to each expensive school. But he had good qualities, too. Allen Ginsberg writes of the “wonderful, perverse Kammerer.” Kerouac notes that he was “not a bad guy in himself.” If nothing else, he introduced Kerouac and Ginsberg to his hometown friend, William S. Burroughs.

October 12, 2007

For the time they were together, it seems Kerouac leaned heavily on Johnson; both before and after the hurly-burly that proceeded On the Road's publication, she represented a rare fixed point in his life. "When I met him in the January of '57, he had absolutely no idea what awaited him," she says. "Because he'd suffered - he'd had a novel published in '49, The Town and the City, and he'd written several other novels, including On the Road, and none of them had been published. And he'd lived an impoverished life, essentially the life of a homeless person. It's all very romantic to go on the road, but it's also rather terrible not to have a place of your own. And he was always sort of searching for a place he could be, but because of the way he was, he could never find that. He'd set off for a new destination imagining it was gonna be great, and then he'd get there and bad vibes would come, and the bad vibes were inside him, of course ..."

Kerouac took, it seems, a similar attitude towards relationships. "Yes," she nods, "I think he had a grass-is-greener idea about women. I also think he was very messed up about women because of his overly intense relationship with his mother. And in a way, I think, flitting from woman to woman was his way of staying faithful to his mother - no one was ever going to supplant her as the fixed figure in his life." When Johnson and Kerouac finally split for good, it was after he had spent an evening drunkenly flirting with another woman right in front of her. "Choked with pain, I searched for the worst words I could think of. 'You're nothing but a big bag of wind!'" she writes in Minor Characters. "'Unrequited love's a bore!' he shouted back. Enraged, we stared at each other, half-weeping, half-laughing. I rushed away, hoping he'd follow. But he didn't."

October 02, 2007

The setting was Sel de la semaine (Salt of the Week), at the time the Montreal-based, premiere televised interview show on Radio-Canada, hosted by the late Fernand Seguin. Seguin, elegantly dressed in a suit, speaking elegant French, introduced his guest to the audience – the famous American author Jack Kerouac, born in Lowell, Mass., to Quebecois parents.

The entire show, taken from the Radio-Canada archives, can now be seen on the Radio-Canada website. Sel de la semaine was clearly an intellectual show – interviewer and interviewee sat on a bare stage, with a jazz combo to the side. Most of the members of the audience looked like well-scrubbed university students, with the men wearing jackets and ties.

Kerouac himself was dressed in an open-necked shirt, with the sleeves rolled up. He was clearly ill at ease – furrowing his brow, fidgeting in his chair, as he tried to answer Seguin's questions in French. Almost immediately, the audience started laughing. Kerouac was puzzled. He asked Seguin why they were laughing.

"They came to see an icon – you know, Jack Kerouac, On The Road – and then he starts to speak French," explains Yves Frenette, a historian at the University of Ottawa. "But it's the French of an older generation. It's not a broken French, it's not even the French of an Anglo speaking French, it's the French of someone who's a farmer, someone far from Montreal."

Pierre Anctil, director of the Institute of Canadian Studies at the University of Ottawa, agrees. "His parents came from a rural area of Quebec in the Gaspé," he comments. "They knew the Quebec of farms and quaint people and small towns and there he was in Montreal, where the entire crew spoke French. He wasn't used to that."

To the members of his audience, anxious to be part of a modern Quebec, hearing Kerouac's French was like an educated American audience hearing a famous author speak in the hillbilly, southern accent of a guest on The Jerry Springer Show. "The way he was speaking, it wasn't so much the words by themselves, it was just the rhythm of the sentences," Anctil says. "It appeared as rural and unlearned and folkloric."